Salades

I bought a lovely cookbook all about salad - Salades by Damien Pignolet.

Those who know me, know I love salad.  I believe that salad can be served with practically every meal at any time of the day.  I was particularly excited to see a book dedicated to salads with a similar philosophy - the book is divided into salads of different categories.

This book is the perfect book to buy at the start of summer - there will undoubtedly be some cool days when you will want a warm salad, although the winter salads may not get a look in over the next few months.

A minor criticism - there aren't enough pictures.  I like at least one picture per recipe, preferably more if there is a tricky technique involved, but in this book not all the salads are pictured.  Those that have been photographed look positively mouthwatering...

Bill's Food

I've owned Bill Granger's boks for a while, and have really only cooked out of one of them previously - you may recall a number of posts I did about Open Kitchen.

Right now I have decided to focus on Bill's Food.  I also own Bill's Sydney Food (which I didn't feel was appropriate as I have just moved to Melbourne!) and Holiday.

As you can probably tell from the dog-earred tags on the book in the picture below, I have been considering cooking from this book for a while.  I think it is typical Bill - a nicely divided book with breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and dessert recipes.  I am particularly excited about cooking corn fritters - which I have had the pleasure of eating for breakfast in Bill's restaurant in Surry Hills, Sydney.

'Open Kitchen' by Bill Granger

At the moment I have three 'books of the moment' - you already know about Cheesecakes of the World and I am counting my monthly Delicious magazine as a book - but I have added Bill Granger's 'Open Kitchen' to the mix. 

Published in 2003, Bill's Open Kitchen is Bill Granger's third book and he has gone on to write a further four books.  Open Kitchen is divided into (mostly) sensible divisions of breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and dessert.

I say 'mostly' sensible as some of the recipes suggested for a lazy weekend lunch would work equally well for a mid-week dinner, though certainly not a mid-week lunch!  The afternoon tea/dessert division works.  In the afternoon tea section are mostly cakes, whereas the desserts are puddings, or frozen treats.

Each recipe is a whole meal, although I tend to add a salad to every dinner, and is beautifully photographed.  The presentation is pretty, and achievable.

I have written a long list of recipes that I want to try from this book - I hope you will all enjoy looking at the results almost as much as G and I enjoy tasting them!

Delicious February 2010 review

This month's Delicious has a beautiful cover - light, summery and tasty looking.  It came with a calico library book bag (between A4 and A3 size with short handles) with an ice cream cone printed on the front of the bag, which was a nice suprise.  Though the magazine has been around for a while this is the first All-Australian issue - usually there are a smattering of Jamie Oliver/Rick Stein/Gordon Ramsay recipes.  

Especially helpful in the magazine is the recipe index right near the back of the magazine - this makes it super easy to find a recipe, presuming you can remember the title of the recipe.  The index is helpfully divided up into starters, mains, sides and sweet. There were 58 recipes in this month's mag - 15 starters, 24 mains, 13 sweets and a handful of sides. 

Recipes that I definitely want to make:

• Brioche french toast
• Asparagus salad with poached eggs
• Heirloom tomato tart with goat's cheese
• Pumpkin lemonade scones
• Trout with crunchy smashed potatoes
• Spiced rice salad

A lot of the other recipes sound delicious, but contain ingredients I don't enjoy the taste of  (rosewater, pork chops, smoked eel).

'Book' of the moment

Just a quick note, as well as cooking from cookbooks (a new one is coming next week) I'm also going to be cooking regularly from Delicious magazine.  I was lucky enough to receive a subscription to Delicious as a Christmas gift so will share my experiences cooking from it, as well as the cook books already in my collection.

Book of the (ongoing) moment: Cheesecakes of the World

So I am probably not going to cook out of this book every week - otherwise there is no way I will fit into a wedding dress that is not a tent!  Instead, I will cook from it as the occasion demands.

I bought this book from a bookseller that used to come to my offices, and it was a bargain - $10 with delivery to my office.

The 'of the world' part of the title is quite accurate.  There is an amazing range of cheesecakes with all kinds of ingredients.  There are cheesecakes that are 'American' (NY style baked cakes), cakes that use ricotta with cream cheese (Italian), cakes that use yoghurt or cottage cheese (Middle Eastern) and even a cake that uses cooked rice (Jamaican).

Every recipe comes with a picture of the completed cake, presented simply and looking super delicious.  Most of the cakes in the book are baked cakes.  Each recipe is pretty simple and the ingredients are listed in categories of 'base' and 'filling' and most of the recipes have less than 5 steps - a couple of which can always be done in the food processor (the base) and the stand mixer (beating the filling).

Really, it was the picture of the frozen peppermint cheesecake that really sold this book for me.

Book of the moment: Faking It by Valli Little

The book I've chosen to cook from for the time being is Faking It by Valli Little. Valli is the food director of the ABC magazine Delicious and has been since 2001.



The subtitle of this book is how to cook delicious food without really trying and right from the welcome page she pushes this point. She is a cook that believes in taking quality shortcuts - buy a decent curry paste or chargrilled eggplants rather than make that yourself.

There are 249 pages + a glossary and an index at the back, as well as the welcome and contents at the front. The book is helpfully, and unhelpfully, broken up into sections. The sections like 'breakfast', 'soups', 'chicken' and 'beef' make total sense. But I don't really understand why 'eggs' is separate from 'breakfast' or why there are 3 fishy sections: 'salmon', 'fish' and 'seafood'. It's a little confusing!

My favourite thing about this book? The pictures of the final presentation of all the dishes (I think all the dishes are photographed). I don't love all the pictures, but I love that they are there. For example, I would never serve a hardboiled egg with only half the shell peeled off as is done in the 'quail eggs with walnut hummus and dukkah'.

I like photographs of how the end product is meant to look because then I have something to aim for. The next best thing is when there are photographs of some of the more complicated steps along the way.

The photographs make me want to cook/make most of these dishes. I say 'make' because this book is both a cook book and a 'how to put store bought ingredients together' book. Many of the recipes, particularly the appetiser ones, suggest you buy an ingredient another cookbook might explain how to make. In the recipe for roasted cherry tomate tarte tatins the ingredients include jars of roasted cherry tomatoes and sheets of frozen puff pastry.

There are a few 'cheffy' things in the book, like the chicken skewered onto sprigs of rosemary or serving a burger deconstructed to capture an image of the delicious looking mayonnaise.

Overall, it's a beautifully presented book. The images are big, and the food looks luscious and plentiful and I can't wait to cook from it.